Mumford & Sons finally play Montrose Beach. How did the show work? The Tribune's review.

Streaks of pink still lingered in the darkening sky as the lights of downtown skyscrapers gleamed in the distance and a sweet fiddle solo wafted through the air.

It was a lovely and hard-won moment for Mumford & Sons as the band played for tens of thousands of fans at Cricket Hill at Montrose Beach and Park Friday night.

The show originally was scheduled for Wednesday and was supposed to be held rain or shine. Instead, the recent heavy rains prevented crews from even being able to prepare the site in time, forcing the band and local concert promoter Jam Productions to postpone it just hours before gates were to open.

As a result, Mumford & Sons missed a scheduled appearance at an Iowa festival, and Jam will pay the Chicago Park District $65,000 for the date change, the Tribune previously reported. Reversing a policy of no refunds for the show, while clearly the right thing to do, left Jam putting tickets back on sale Friday for what had been a sold-out show expected to draw 35,000.

Nonetheless, by the time Mumford & Sons took the stage (following opening acts Son Little and the Maccabees), the concert area was packed from the front of the stage across a wide field and up Cricket Hill. No wonder that during the show band leader Marcus Mumford repeatedly and graciously thanked fans for adjusting to the change of date.

The incident again begs the question of whether it's really a good idea to keep scheduling massive summer concerts in Chicago public parks. In the past few years alone, the combination of rain and large crowds have turned lawn conditions at Riot Fest, Lollapalooza and FirstMerit Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island into mud pits.

The players brought the Stanley Cup trophy to the Mumford & Sons’ concert at Montrose Beach, where the Blackhawks’ Niklas Hjalmarsson invited members of the Grammy-winning band to drink from the Cup on stage.

“It’s a great thing I didn’t tell (them)...

(Luis Gomez)

Despite the rains, by Friday the ground was firm and dry. The gently sloping hill provided a natural equivalent of bleachers and a terrific view of the skyline, and the field below served as an organic main crowd section.

Sight lines were comparable to other area outdoor venues, with the ability to see the stage, or the massive video screens flanking it, dependent on the height of the people standing immediately in front of you.

It's a perpetual problem, and making the entire area general admission rather than offering a reserved seating section penalized anyone who couldn't get off work early enough to stake out a prime spot.

Woe to anyone who didn't get in line early for the food vendors, as some fans reported 90-minute waits. “We were about 15 people from the front when we were told they were out of everything but curry fries,” lamented Julia Kelly of Western Springs. The queues for beverage tents also stretched to fuggedaboudit extents.

Hearing the bands apparently wasn't an issue no matter one's location, because the music reportedly (and according to a number of social media posts) carried all the way to Andersonville and Edgewater. It didn't seem excessively loud on the hill, though, and the sound was extremely clear and well-differentiated.

That instrumentation got Mumford & Sons tagged as folk-rock revivalists soon after they formed in London in 2007, a label they seem determined to shake off with the alternative rock of their third record, “Wilder Mind,” released last month.

More than anything, though, their almost exactly two-hour performance -- generous, energetic and tightly played as it was -- suggested that Mumford & Sons ultimately is a younger generation's version of the Dave Matthews Band.

Like Matthews, Mumford has a husky voice that favors big, rising choruses, and both bands rely far too much on crescendo after crescendo after crescendo to create excitement.

The band added admittedly lovely harmonies to this formula on the likes of “Lover's Eyes,” and also incorporated the occasional fanfares of a two-man horn section on songs including “Lover of the Light.”

Even with these embellishments, the music rarely was more than innocuously pleasant and vaguely portentous. The new songs pointed to a more interesting path, from the rippling groove and searing guitar of “Snake Eyes” to the calamitous rock of “The Wolf.”

It's telling, though, that the most fervent cheers of the night came when a half dozen or so member of the Chicago Blackhawks joined the band onstage, literally letting the musicians drink from the Stanley Cup.

Ultimately, the show was a night to celebrate all things Chicago, from the skyline to the hockey team to the ability to rebound from bad weather. Mumford & Sons just happened to be playing in the background.